Dec 26, 2017

Sea Shepherd has released footage showing one of its spy drones being shot down Sunday night by poachers in Mexico’s Sea of Cortez.

The conservation group is in the northern Sea of Cortez, or Gulf of California, trying to locate and remove gill-nets that indiscriminately catch critically endangered vaquita porpoises.

Late Sunday night, the MV John Paul DeJoria crew used radar and a night-vision drone to locate three skiffs working inside a vast no-fishing zone.

Poachers use gill-nets to target totoaba, a type of croaker whose swim bladders fetch thousands of dollars on black markets in China and Hong Kong, where the bladders are believed by some to possess special medicinal powers.

The nets sometimes trap and drown vaquitas, which might number fewer than 20 animals and are on the brink of extinction. (Vaquitas are endemic to the northern Sea of Cortez.)

In the footage, viewers can see four men on one of the skiffs, which appears illuminated because of night-vision technology. The man in the rear can be seen aiming and shooting at the drone, which is eventually destroyed.

“Poachers often conceal themselves in the cover of night, which is what we suspected to be the case here,” Capt. Benoit Sandjian said in a news release.

The drone had been shot at by the crew of a different skiff before it was shot down as it hovered about 100 feet above the four men and their net. The Sea Shepherd crew was 1.4 miles away, aboard the John Paul DeJorian, when it realized it had lost the unmanned aircraft.

Sea Shepherd said this was the first time poachers had used firearms to try to disable spy drones.

Mexico has tried several measures to save the vaquita, and to prevent poaching. But with totoaba bladders in such high-priced demand, illegal fishing within the exclusion zone – often spearheaded by powerful drug cartels – remains problematic.

Sea Shepherd is patrolling the exclusion zone in cooperation with the Mexican Navy, in what Sea Shepherd calls Operation Milagro.